Semiconductor devices such as integrated circuits (ICs) can be formed using a variety of processing techniques including wet and dry processes. Dry processes are those that generally do not include the introduction of liquids. Examples of dry processes are additive processes such as chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and physical vapor deposition (PVD) and subtractive processes such as dry (e.g., plasma or ion) etching.
Etching is a subtractive process that can be used to remove portions of a semiconductor substrate. For example, a trench or via can be created in an interlayer dielectric (ILD) by etching away a portion of the interlayer dielectric. Other processes, such as metallization to add copper or other conductive lines in the etched regions can subsequently be performed.
Dry etching techniques include those that expose a substrate or other semiconductor material to ions, such as reactive ion etching (RIE) or plasma-based etching. The results of dry etching techniques can depend heavily on a variety of processing parameters. Additionally, other dry semiconductor processing techniques, such as those using flux-based processes (e.g. physical vapor deposition), can also depend heavily on processing parameters.
Thus, what is needed is a technique to effectively evaluate processing parameters of dry semiconductor processing techniques.